Leonardo da Vinci

His Spiritual and Intellectual Greatness At the Turning Point of the New Age

Schmidt Number: S-2713

On-line since: 23rd June, 2006

A Lecture given
by Dr. Rudolf Steiner
Berlin, February 13th, 1913
GA 62

This is the 11th of 14 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin,
in late 1912 and early 1913. The title of this series of lectures is:
Results of Spiritual Investigation.
They were published in German as:
Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung.
The lecture was transcribed from a typescript version, and the
translator is unknown. It is presented here with the kind permission
of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
From GA# 62.

This e.Text edition is provided through the wonderful work of:Various e.Text Transcribers

Lovingly typed and donated by an anonymous donor, this lecture has been made available to everyone.

Leonardo da Vinci
His Spiritual and Intellectual Greatness
At the Turning Point of the New Age

A Lecture
By
Rudolf Steiner

Berlin, February 13th, 1913

My
Dear Friends,

The
name of Leonardo is constantly being brought before the minds of
innumerable people through the wide circulation of perhaps the best
known of all pictures, the celebrated “Last Supper”. Who
does not know Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper” and
knowing it, does not admire the mighty idea expressed more
particularly in this picture? There we see embodied pictorially a
significant moment — one that by innumerable souls is
considered the most significant of the world's events: the
figure of the Christ in the center, and on either side of Him the
twelve Disciples. We see these twelve Disciples with deeply
expressive movements and bearing; we see the gestures and attitudes
of each of the twelve figures so individualized, that we may well
receive the impression that every form of the human soul and
character binds expression in them. Every way in which a soul would
relate itself according to its particular temperament and character,
to what the picture expresses, is embodied in them. In his treatise
on the subject of Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper”,
Goethe expressed perhaps better than any writer the moment after
Jesus Christ uttered the words, “One of you shall betray ME”.
We see what is taking place in each of these twelve souls, so closely
connected with the speaker and who look up to Him so devoutly, after
the utterance of these words; we see all that wonderfully expressed
by each of these souls in the numerous reproductions of this work
which are disseminated through the world.

There have been
representations of the “Last Supper” dating from earlier
times. We can trace them without going still further back, from
Giotto
down to Leonardo da Vinci; and we find that Leonardo
introduced into his “Last Supper”, what we might call the
dramatic element, for it is a wonderfully dramatic moment that
confronts us in his representation. The earlier representations
appear to be peaceful, expressing, as it were, only the fact of being
together. Leonardo's “Last Supper” seems the first
to conjure up before us with full dramatic force an expression of
very significant psychic conditions. If, however, the world-famed
reproductions have given us an impression of the idea of the picture
which enters into our hearts and souls, and we then go to Milan, to
that old Dominican church, Santa Maria Delle Grazie, and there see on
the wall what can only be described as blurred, indistinct, damp
daubs of color — which are all that remains of the original
picture, so famous the whole world over through the reproductions —
we may perhaps then be led to investigate further. The impression
that comes to us then, is that for some long time back, there has not
been much visible on the walls of the old Dominican church of the
picture, of which those who saw it after Leonardo painted it spoke in
such enthusiastic, fervent and rapturous terms. What must once have
spoken to the soul from these walls as a miracle of art, not only
through the idea which had just been expressed with difficulty, but
what must have spoken through Leonardo's marvel of color in
such a way that in these colors was expressed the inmost depths of
the soul — aye, the very heartbeat of the twelve Disciples —
all that must have long ceased to be visible on the wall. What has
this picture not had to suffer in the course of the ages!

Leonardo felt himself
compelled to depart in technique from the method in which such
frescoes had been painted by his predecessors; he found the sort of
colors formerly used were not striking enough. He wanted to conjure
on to this wall (as through magically) the finest emotions of the
soul; and therefore he tried as had not been done before — he
used oil colors. There then arose a multitude of obstacles. The
position of the whole place was such that comparatively soon these
colors must be affected. Damp came out of the very wall itself; the
whole room which was used as a refectory by the Dominicans was often
completely under water in the floors. Many other things intervened
besides — the quartering of soldiers there in war time and so
on. The picture had all this to undergo. At one time the monks of the
monastery themselves did not behave with special piety towards this
picture; they found that the door which led from the kitchen into the
refectory of the monastery was too low, and one fine day they had the
door heightened. This ruined a great part of the picture. Then at one
time a coat of arms was placed right over the head of Christ. In
short, the picture received the most barbarous treatment. Then there
were “artistic charlatans” — as we must call them —
who painted it over, so that scarcely anything of the original
coloring is now to be seen. In spite of this, when one stands before
the picture, an indescribable enchantment proceeds from it. All the
barbarisms, the painting-over, and the soaking could not
fundamentally destroy the charm which proceeds from the picture.
Although it is today no more than a mere shadow stretching across the
wall, yet a magic proceeds from this picture. That magic lies only
partly in the painting; rather, it is the conception that works on
the soul — it works powerfully.

Anyone who has
acquainted himself with Leonardo's other works, and tried to
study the reproductions of the works ascribed to Leonardo scattered
through the different galleries of Europe, which have been preserved
more or less as he painted them, anyone who has acquainted himself
with Leonardo's activities and has made a study of what he has
written in the course of time, and of his life as it flowed on from
the year 1452 to 1519, will stand before this picture in the
Dominican refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria Delle Grazie at
Milan with very peculiar emotions. For in reality, as much of
the magic creation which Leonardo once painted on this wall has been
preserved to us, we feel that just so much does there still
remain for the universal consciousness of man of the mighty
greatness, of the power and content of the comprehensive personality
of Leonardo himself. The extent of the influence of Leonardo's
work on people today, stands practically in the same relation to what
this comprehensive personality put into the evolution of the world as
these faded and blurred colors do, to what Leonardo once conjured up
on the wall. We stand sadly before this picture in Milan, and with
the same sadness we confront the whole figure of Leonardo.

Goethe points out how,
if we allow the lives written by earlier biographers to work upon us,
we receive an impression that in Leonardo a personality appears to
mankind, working everywhere with a fresh life force, contemplating
life joyfully and working joyously on life, taking up everything with
love, with a tremendous thirst for knowledge desiring to grasp
everything fresh in soul, and fresh in body. Then perchance we turn
to that portrait of his in Turin, supposed to be painted by himself,
and look at this picture of Leonardo as an old man — this face
with its expressive lines caused by suffering, with the embittered
mouth, and the features which betray something of the opposition
which Leonardo had to feel towards the world and towards all he had
to experience. In a remarkable way this personality appears at the
beginning of the new age. Then, if we once more turn back to the
picture in Santa Maria Delle Grazie and endeavor to study this shadow
on the wall of the refectory, trying to compare it with the oldest
reproductions of this picture, and try, as it were, with “the
eyes of the spirit” (to use Goethe's words) to call up
the picture within us, the following feeling may perhaps arise: Did
he who once painted this picture go forth satisfied when he put the
last touch to it? Did he say to himself: “Thou hast here
recorded what lived in thy soul”?

It appears to me, one
may quite naturally arrive at this feeling. Why?

If we survey the whole
of Leonardo's life, we must admit that the feeling just
described is aroused. We begin by studying Leonardo from his birth.
He was an illegitimate child, the son of a mediocre father —
Ser Pietro of Vinci — and of a peasant woman who then entirely
disappears from view, while the father marries respectably and puts
his child out to nurse. We see the child growing up alone, having
intercourse only with nature and his soul, and we see what an
enormous amount of life force there must have been in this human
being that enabled him to remain so fresh! For above all he did
retain his youthful freshness. Then, as he already showed a talent
for drawing, he entered the school of Verrochio. His father sent him
there because he believed his talent for drawing could be made
useful. Here Leonardo was employed to assist in painting the Master's
pictures. An anecdote is related of this period — how Leonardo
had once to paint in a figure which, when the Master saw, he resolved
to paint no more, because he knew he was surpassed by his pupil. This
seems to be more than a mere story, when one considers the whole
being of Leonardo.

We then find him in
Florence, his artistic talent always increasing: but we find
something else besides. If we follow up his talent for painting we
are impressed with the feeling that year after year he went about
making the greatest artistic plans, constantly making new ones. He
had also commissions from people who recognized his great gift and
wanted to own something of his. First he would form an idea of what
he wanted to create and then he began to study; but in what did this
study consist? He entered in an extraordinarily characteristic way
into every detail that came into consideration. For instance, if he
had to paint a picture with three or four figures in it, he did not
only study a single model but he went about the town observing
hundreds and hundreds of people. He would often follow a person for a
whole day if a feature interested him, and sometimes he would invite
all sorts of people of different classes to come to him and would
tell them all sorts of things to amuse or frighten them, so that he
might study their features in the different soul experiences. Once,
when a rioter was caught and hanged, Leonardo went to the place of
execution, and the drawing is still preserved in which he tried to
catch the facial expression, the whole bearing of the victim; in the
lower corner is the drawing of another head so as to catch the whole
expression. Caricatures have been preserved, incredible figures by
Leonardo, from which we can see what he was trying to do. For
instance, he would take a face and make the experiment of making the
chin larger and larger. To study the significance of a single part of
the human form, he would enlarge a single limb, to ascertain how in
the natural size this limb was dovetailed into the whole human
organism. Caricatured forms — in all sorts of contortions —
we find in Leonardo. Drawings of his have been preserved (many the
works of his pupils, but many by himself as well) in which he has
drawn the same detail over and over again — drawings which he
would then use.

If we consider this
attentively, we get an impression that he worked in the following
way: suppose he had an order for a picture and had to represent this
or that. He studied the details in the way just described. His
interest was then aroused in something special, and he no longer
continued to study for the purpose of the picture, but to learn the
peculiarities of some animal or man. If he had to paint a battle, he
would go to the riding school to study detail or somewhere where
horses were left to themselves, and in this way he lost sight of the
original conception for which he had meant to use the study. In this
way study after study accumulated, and in the end he had no interest
in returning to the picture. Among the important pictures originating
from his early Florentine time (although they had been painted over,
and their original form is no longer recognizable) we have the “St.
Hieronymus” and the “Adoration of the Magi” for
which innumerable such studies exist as have just been described.
Moreover, we have the feeling that this man lived in the fullness of
the secrets of the universe; he sought to penetrate them, tried in an
original way to reproduce the secrets of nature, but never really
attained the creation of any work of which he could say it was in any
way complete.

We must put ourselves
in the place of this soul, who was too rich to bring anything to
completion, a soul in whom the secrets of the universe so worked that
no matter where he began, he had to pass on from secret to secret and
could never come to an end. We must try to understand the soul of
Leonardo, which was too great in itself ever to be able to reveal its
full greatness.

Let us pursue our study
of Leonardo. We see how he was given two commissions by Duke
Ludovico, one of which was the “Last Supper” and the
other an equestrian statue of the Duke's father. This brought
him to Milan. Further investigation shows us that Leonardo worked
from fifteen to sixteen years at these two works. To be sure, many
other things were going on at the same time. In describing him as we
have just done, we must, to understand him fully, add that the Duke
had not summoned him as a painter only. The Duke sent for Leonardo
because he was not only a distinguished musician, but perhaps one of
the most distinguished musicians of his time. And it was due to his
musical gifts that he was summoned to the Duke's court —
not only on that account, however, but because he was one of the most
important war engineers of his time — one of the most important
hydraulic engineers and one of the most important mechanics of his
time — and because he could promise the Duke to supply him with
engines of war that were something quite new — engines
utilizing steam power — and because he could construct
suspension bridges which could easily be put up and taken down
quickly. At the same time, he worked at the construction of a flying
machine. To accomplish this he busied himself in observing the flight
of birds, and what remains of Leonardo's writings concerning
the manner in which birds fly, are among the most original existing
in the world on this subject. At the same time it must always be
remembered when we have Leonardo's writings in our hands today
that these are only copies containing much that is inaccurate, and in
this form they correspond to what we can now see of the “Last
Supper”. Yet in all these things, we can clearly see what a
great and comprehensive genius Leonardo was.

We can now see how
Leonardo not only assisted the Court of Milan on every possible
occasion — arranging this or that artistic or theatrical event,
but we also see him working out all sorts of military and other
schemes and assisting the builders of the Cathedral with advice and
help. Besides this, we know that he trained innumerable pupils who
then worked at the different works in Milan; so that one can hardly
imagine today how much of Leonardo's work is incorporated into
the whole town of Milan and its neighborhood.

In addition to all this
Leonardo was engaged in making endless studies for the statue of the
Duke's father, Francesco Sforza. One might say there was not a
single limb of the horse that he did not study a hundred times, in a
hundred different positions, and in the course of many years he
completed the model of the horse. Then through an accident, when it
was set up at a festival, it was destroyed — and he had to make
it all over again. This second model was also destroyed when the
French invaded Milan in 1499, for the soldiers used the model as a
target and shot it to pieces. There is nothing left of the gigantic
labors of a personality who, one may really say, tried to discover
one world-secret after another, in order to construct a work in which
dead matter should be a manifestation of life, as it reveals itself
in the secrets of nature.

We know how Leonardo
worked at the “Last Supper”. He often went and sat on the
scaffolding and brooded for hours in front of the wall, then he would
take a brush and make a few strokes and go away again. Sometimes he
only went and stared at the picture and went away again. When he was
painting the Christ Figure, his hand trembled. Indeed, if we put
together all that we can find concerning this subject we must say
that neither outwardly nor inwardly was Leonardo happy when painting
this world-renowned picture. Now there were people at that time in
Milan who were displeased with the slow progress of the picture, for
instance a Prior of the monastery, who could not see why an artist
could not paint such a picture quickly, and complained to the Duke.
He too thought the affair had lasted too long. Leonardo answered:
“The picture is to represent Jesus Christ and Judas, the two
greatest contrasts; one cannot paint them in one year; there are no
models for them in the world, neither for Judas nor for Christ”.
After he had been working at the picture for years, he said he did
not know whether he could finish it after all! Then he said that if
finally he found no model for Judas he could always use the Prior
himself! It was thus extraordinarily difficult to bring the picture
to a conclusion but within himself Leonardo did not feel happy. For
this picture showed the contrast between what lived in his soul and
what he was able to represent on the canvas. Here it is necessary to
bring forward a hypothesis of Spiritual Science, which may be reached
by anyone who studies what can by degrees be learned about this
picture.

The following
hypothesis presented itself to me as I tried to find an answer to the
above-mentioned question. If one follows up Leonardo's life in
this way one says to oneself: in this man there lived an enormous
amount that he could not reveal outwardly to mankind; the external
means were much too feeble to express this. Was he able, as without
doubt he intended in the “Last Supper”, to paint into
this work a grandeur that would have satisfied him? This question
arises quite naturally, when one realizes how again and again he
tried to investigate secret after secret for his studies to bring
something into existence, and did not succeed. After all, one is
bound to ask such a question: and it almost answers itself. If
Leonardo on the one hand only got as far with the equestrian statue
which he had intended to make a miracle of plastic art, as making a
model which was destroyed, so that he never even touched the statue
itself, and if, after sixteen years of work, he finally said good-bye
to this unexecuted statue — how did he leave the “Last
Supper”? One has the feeling: he went away from this “Last
Supper” dissatisfied! If all we can see of this picture today
is a ruin of blurred, damp colors, and if for a long time past
nothing more has been perceptible of what Leonardo once painted on
the wall, we may perhaps maintain that what he painted there could
not in the faintest degree have represented what lived in his soul.

To arrive at such a
conclusion it is necessary to put together all the different
impressions one receives from the picture itself, but there are also
a few external aids. Among the writings of Leonardo still extant,
there is a wonderful treatise on painting. In it painting in its
essence as an art is set forth, how it must work in relation to
perspective and coloring, how it must work according to principle.
Oh! This work of Leonardo's on painting, although we have only
a fragment of it, is a wonderful work, the like of which has never
been accomplished in the world. The highest principles of the art of
painting are here represented as only the greatest genius could
represent them. It is wonderful to read, for instance, how Leonardo
shows that in painting a battle, the horses had to be represented
with the suitable foreshortening because it brought out the
impression of bestiality and yet of grandeur that should be
perceptible in a battle. In short, this work is a wonderful one. It
shows us all Leonardo's greatness and, we may say, all his
impotence. We shall refer to this again. Above all it betrays how he
always tried in the representation of his art to study the reality as
it presented itself to the human eye. How light and shade and
coloring are to be turned to account in painting, all this is to be
found wonderfully described in this work of Leonardo. If we find in
Leonardo's soul the ardent longing of his conscience never even
in the smallest particular to offend against the truth — which,
as we shall see further on, he prized so highly — if that
feeling animated his soul, we may say that this is apparent
everywhere; that is, the resolution never to offend against the truth
of the impression, always so to work that the impression is justified
by the inner secrets of nature.

If we let his “Last
Supper” work on us, we find two things of which we can say that
they do not altogether agree with Leonardo's view of the
principles of painting. One is the figure of Judas. From the
reproductions and also to a certain extent from the shadowy painting
in Milan, one gets the impression that Judas is quite covered in
shadow — he is quite dark. Now when we study how the light
falls from the different sides, and how with regard to the other
eleven disciples the lighting conditions are represented in the most
wonderful manner in accordance with reality, nothing really explains
the darkness on the face of Judas. Art can give us no answer as to
the wherefore of this darkness. This is fairly clear as regards the
Judas figure. If we now turn to the Christ Figure, approaching it not
according to Spiritual Science but according to the external view, it
only produces, as it were, something like a suggestion. Just as
little as the blackness, the darkness of the Judas figure seems
justifiable, just as little does the “sunniness” of the
Christ Figure, standing out as it does from the other figures, seem
to be justified, in this sense. We can understand the lighting of all
the other countenances but not that of Judas nor that of Christ
Jesus. Then, as if of itself, the idea comes into one's mind:
surely the painter has striven to make evident that in these two
opposites, Jesus and Judas, light and darkness proceed not from
outside but from within. He probably wished to make us realize that
the light on the face of the Christ cannot be explained by the outer
conditions of light, and yet we can believe that the Soul behind this
Countenance is itself a light force, so that It can shine of Itself,
in spite of the lighting conditions. In the same way the impression
with respect to Judas, is, that this form itself conjures up a shadow
which is not explained by the shadows around it.

This is, as already
said, a hypothesis of Spiritual Science, but one that has developed
in me in the course of many years and we may believe that the more we
considered the problem the more we would find it substantiated.
According to this hypothesis one can understand how Leonardo, who
strove to be true to nature in all his work and study, worked with
trembling brush to present a problem that could only be justified
with respect to this one figure. We can then understand that he might
well be bitterly disappointed, indubitably so, because it was
impossible by means of the then existing art to bring this problem to
expression with complete truthfulness and probability. Because he
could not yet do what he wanted, he finally despaired of the
possibility of its execution and had to leave a picture behind him
which still did not satisfy him, and the question as to the feelings
with which Leonardo left his picture can be answered in full accord
with the whole figure and spiritual greatness of Leonardo. He left it
with a feeling of bitterness, realizing that in his most important
work he had set himself a task, the execution of which could never be
satisfactory with the means available to man. If in the centuries to
come no eye will see the picture Leonardo had conjured on to the wall
at Milan — that, in any case, was certainly not what lived in
his soul. If we picture him thus before his most important creation,
we are indeed tempted to ask: What secret really lay behind this
figure?

A fortnight ago we
considered the personality of
Raphael
and tried to show what a
different understanding we obtain of such a man as he, if we rest on
the principles of Spiritual Science. For we know clearly that the
human soul is something that repeatedly returns to many earth lives,
that a soul born into a certain age does not live that one life
alone, but in the whole plan and process of its evolution brings with
it the predispositions acquired in earlier earth lives, and with
these predispositions finds itself confronting what the spiritual
environment now offers. If we so regard the soul, knowing that it
enters into existence with an inner spiritual inheritance that had
its origin in repeated earth lives — and admitting that the
whole of evolution seems full of meaning and wisdom, we postulate
that things do not happen accidentally in certain epochs, but in
accordance with rule and law, as the blossom of the plant appears
after the green leaf — if we accept the existence of a plan
full of wisdom in the history of the evolution of man, according to
which the human soul returns again and again from the spiritual
regions — then only do the individual figures become
comprehensible. What can be studied with regard to particular human
lives is more clearly manifest if we observe those human souls which
are exceptional, out of the ordinary. If we study Leonardo as we have
tried to sketch him at particular moments of his life, we are led
again to consider the background from which this soul stands out.
This background is the time in which this soul was placed, from the
year 1452 to 1519.

What manner of time was
this? It was the time before the rise of modern natural science and
the views which result from that. It was the time before the birth of
Copernicus' conception of the world, before the influence of
Giordano Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo. How do we view this age in the
light of Spiritual Science? We have repeatedly drawn attention to the
fact that the further we go back in the course of human evolution,
the greater is the difference in the whole of man's outlook and
his connection with his surroundings. In the primeval ages of man's
evolution we find in every soul a kind of clairvoyance, by means of
which, in the transition stage between sleeping and waking, he looked
into the spiritual world. This original clairvoyance was lost in the
course of time; but until the Fifteenth Century, there still remained
from earlier times a remnant of this clairvoyance; not clairvoyance
itself — that was long before lost — but what remained
was a feeling that the human soul was connected with the spiritual
background of the world. What souls had once been able to see, they
could still feel, and although this feeling had already become weak,
still they felt that in the center of their being they were connected
with the spiritual that lived and wove in the world, even as physical
processes in the human body are connected with the physical events of
the world. According to the laws of evolution, the old intercourse
between man's soul and the spiritual world had to be lost for a
time. Modern natural science could never have blossomed if the old
clairvoyance had remained. The whole of this old way of looking at
things had to be lost, so that the soul could turn to what the senses
offered and what could be scientifically proved by the intellect
belonging to the brain. The world outlook based on natural science,
which has been built up from the time of Leonardo until today, was
only made possible through the loss of the old spiritual perception
of mankind and through man's inclining himself “objectively”
to external sense perception and to what the intellect can grasp
through that.

Today we again stand at
a new turning point, at the turning point leading to a time in which
it will again be possible for man, through modern Spiritual Science,
to attain to a spiritual view of things. For the development of
natural science has a double significance. First, it had to give to
man the treasures of natural science. In the course of the centuries
since the appearance of Copernicus, Kepler and others, natural
science has passed on from triumph to triumph, and been adapted in a
wonderful way to practical and theoretical life. That is one result
that has been gained through natural science in the centuries since
the time of Leonardo. The other is something that could not come at
once but has only become possible in our own times. For not only have
we to thank natural science for what we have learned through the
Copernican system, through the observations and discoveries of Kepler
and Galileo, and the experience of modern spectro-analysis, and so
on, but we have also to thank science for a certain education of the
human soul. The human soul first of all began to observe the sense
world; in this way natural science was built up. Through natural
science new ideas and new conceptions were formed, but where it has
rendered the greatest service its greatness was not acquired through
sense perception, but through something quite different.

This has already been
referred to. In one particular sphere, in the time of Copernicus,
people relied on sense perception. What was the result? People
believed that the earth stood still in space and that the sun and the
planets revolved around it. Then came Copernicus, who had the courage
not to rely on sense perception. He had the courage to say that when
one relied entirely on sense perception one did not make a single
empirical discovery, but that empirical discoveries could be made if
one combined in one's thinking all that had
previously been observed. Then men followed in his footsteps and went
further, but it is essentially a mistaken view of the state of
affairs to believe that natural science reached its present height
because mankind relied only on the senses. What has come to mankind
through natural science has, however, impressed itself on the soul;
the ideas of natural science live within us and have educated our
souls. Natural science, besides the discoveries it has given us, has
also been a means of education for the soul, and souls have today
become mature because the ideals of natural science have really not
only been thought but lived, so that souls of their own accord will
be driven into Spiritual Science. Human souls had, however, first to
become ripe for that, and for that centuries had to elapse since
Leonardo's time.

Now let us consider
Leonardo. He enters his age with a soul that, in an earlier
existence, belonged to those initiates who had raised themselves in
the old way to the secrets of world conception. This experience could
not be continued in the age into which he was born, the Fifteenth
Century. For in earlier incarnations insofar as these earlier earth
lives made it possible, one may have experienced the cosmic mysteries
in a great and mighty way; but how they can be brought through into
one's consciousness in a new life, depends on the external
physical body. A fifteenth-century body could not bring to expression
the inner thought, inner feeling, and inner power of execution which
Leonardo had taken up into himself in earlier stages of existence.
What he brought from earlier lives worked only as a force; but he was
condemned to be confined in a body living in the age directly before
the rise of natural science, and he felt himself limited in every
direction. The time was then coming, the dawn was already there, when
man would only perceive the world of sense existence with the senses,
and would only think with the intellect that is connected with the
instrument of the brain. Leonardo was always driven to seek for the
spirit; he brought that with him from previous lives. The impulse to
seek for the spirit worked in a glorious and grand way in him.

Let us now consider him
as ARTIST. Art had become very different in Leonardo's time
from what it was in the Greek period. Let us try, for instance, to
realize the creation of a plastic statue by a Greek artist. What kind
of feeling do we get when we contemplate the statue of Marcus
Aurelius, for example? Never would they who executed such a work have
molded the form from an external model or made studies in detail as
did Michaelangelo or Leonardo. The wonderful horse of Marcus
Aurelius' statue was certainly never studied as Leonardo
studied his for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza; and yet
how alive are these old statues! What is the reason? It is because in
Greek times human souls felt themselves to be really the creators of
their bodies, they identified themselves with all the soul forces of
the universe. In the age of Greek art one felt in an arm, for
instance, all the forces that formed that arm. Man felt himself
within the independent inner being of his own form. He did not look
at the form from outside but created “consciously” from
within, for he was still conscious of the formative creative force.
We can still prove that externally even today. Look at the Greek
statues of women; they were all experienced directly. Therefore they
are all represented at the age in which expanding growth is present.
We feel in these that the artist imitated nature because he was
within the spirit of nature, because he felt himself connected in his
soul with the spirit of nature. This feeling of being one with the
spirit which weaved and lived in things had to be lost in Leonardo's
time; it had to be lost for otherwise the new age could not have
come. This is not a criticism of the age, but a statement of the
meaning of the facts.

Let us now see how
Leonardo went to work when he studied the movements of the hand, or
of the separate parts of an animal, or the human countenance! He
shows by his methods that he had in his soul an inner knowledge, an
inner realization, but this did not, however, rise into his
consciousness. There was something that worked in a living way on
those figures, but Leonardo could not grasp it inwardly. He felt
himself separated from this “inner comprehension” and so
nothing satisfied him. There he stands, in expectation of this new
natural-scientific world outlook, which he cannot himself possess
because it is not yet in existence. Take his writings — on
every page problems spring up which mankind could only solve in the
course of the three following centuries, some of them indeed have not
yet been solved. Leonardo had most wonderful ideas, of which, in many
cases, he could make no use at all. We find them in his works and
also in his artistic creations. Thus we find in him that
powerlessness, to which a soul must be subject in an age that sees
the end of an old world outlook, and in which the new has not yet
arisen. This new world outlook certainly led to the splitting up of
man's comprehensive outlook into a study of detail; we see the
beginning of specialization of individual branches of work. In
Leonardo everything is still united. He is at one and the same time
an all-embracing artist, musician, philosopher, and mechanician. He
united all these in himself because his soul came over from olden
times possessing great capacities, but now in this new age, he can
just touch things from the outside but cannot penetrate them. So from
the human point of view Leonardo appears as a tragic figure, but seen
from a higher one, his was a figure of tremendous significance —
at the dawn of a new age.

We can see that for
ourselves if we examine what Leonardo created further. He brought the
most important things only to a certain point, when his pupils had to
work on them. Even with regard to such work as his “John”
or “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre in Paris, we see how the
technical treatment was such that they must soon lose their
brilliancy. We see in everything, how Leonardo could never do enough
to satisfy himself. It is not possible without having the pictures
before us to speak in detail of his paintings. If we absorb ourselves
in them we can see how Leonardo as artist always touched limits
beyond which he could not go; and how what lived in his soul never
once reached the point of flowing up from soul experience into
consciousness; how for a moment it flared up from that state of soul
experience in such a way that one might rejoice aloud and then sink
back in sorrow, because it did not come into full consciousness. It
never once did so to Leonardo.

We really follow
Leonardo's fate with very sad feelings when we see how in the
end he was taken to France by Francis I, and spent the last three
years of his life in a dwelling place assigned to him by Francis, in
spiritual contemplation of the mysteries of existence. We find him
there as a lonely man, who could really no longer have anything in
common with the world around him, and who must have felt an enormous
contrast between what he realized as the primeval foundations of
existence, which might take form in art, and the fragment of it which
was all he had been able to give to the world.

If we consider the
matter in this light we look back to Leonardo saying: “Here is
a soul in which a great deal, an infinite amount takes place”.
The impression made on the observer is very distressing if he
represents to himself what his soul contributed to human activities.
Even at the time of Leonardo's death how insignificant was the
external manifestation of this soul's contribution to human
activities, in comparison with what lived within it! We are
confronted with an economy of existence if we adopt the theory that
human life exhausts itself in what comes into existence externally.
How senseless and aimless seems the life of a soul such as Leonardo's
when we see what went on within it, and what it had to suffer and
endure on account of this, compared with what it might have given to
the world! What a contrast there would be if we were to say that this
soul was only to be regarded according to its manifestation in
external life! No! We must not regard it thus! We must look at it
from another standpoint and say: No matter what this soul may have
given to the world or experienced, what it went through in its inmost
being belongs to another world, a world that compared with our own is
a super-sensible one. Such men are above all a proof that man's
soul belongs to a super-sensible existence and that such souls as
Leonardo's have something to do with super-sensible existence,
and what they can give to the external world is only a by-product of
what they have to go through altogether.

We can only get the
right impression if we add to the current of external human events
another, a super-sensible, current and say: Something runs, as it
were, parallel with the sense current, and such souls as these are
embedded in the super-sensible; they must live in it to form the
connecting links between the sensible and the super-sensible. The life
of such souls only appears to have a meaning if we admit a
super-sensible existence in which they are embedded. We see very
little of Leonardo by looking at his external creations; we get the
idea that this soul has still to carry out something in a
super-sensible existence and we say to ourselves: Oh! We understand!
In order that this soul, in the whole course of its collective
existence, which runs through many earth lives, could always reveal
something to mankind, it had in its Leonardo existence to pass
through a life in which it was only able to bring to expression the
very smallest part of what lived within it. Such souls as Leonardo
are world riddles and life riddles — world riddles incarnate.

What I wanted to bring
out today was not to be presented in sharply defined concepts, but it
should only point the way in which such souls can be approached. For
Spiritual Science must indeed not present theories! Spiritual Science
should, in all that it undertakes, grasp the whole of man's
life of feeling and experience, and must itself become an elixir of
life, so that through it we gain a new relation to the whole of life;
and such spirits as Leonardo are peculiarly fitted to lead one to
this new relation to the world and to life, so that through Spiritual
Science we may understand the world. If we contemplate spirits such
as Leonardo we can say: They enter life as enigmas, because they have
to work out in their lives something greater than their age can give
them. Because they bring the results of previous incarnations, souls
such as Leonardo not only enter life in a humble position, but even
as Leonardo entered it. Born of mediocre father and of a mother who
soon disappeared from view after bearing an illegitimate child, he
was brought up among middle class people. Thus we see him thrown on
his own resources, and giving expression to what he had brought over
from previous lives. When we consider the unfavorable conditions of
his birth, we recognize that these did not hinder the manifestation
of his great soul capacities. We see Leonardo's soul so sane,
so comprehensive, that we can echo what Goethe says out of his own
soul: “Symmetrically and beautifully formed, there he stood, as
a pattern for humanity, even as the power of comprehension and
clarity of the eyes really belongs to the mind, so clarity and
perfection were possessed by this artist in the highest degree”.
If we apply these words to Leonardo — to whom they are
applicable — we must apply them to the youthful Leonardo, who
appears before us fresh in body and mind, accomplished, full of the
joy of creation, joy in the world, and longing for the world; a
perfect man, a pattern man, born to be a conqueror, and full of
humor, as he shows on various occasions in life.

Then we turn our gaze
to the drawing which is considered to be, and justly so, his own
portrait drawn by himself — the drawing of an old man —
in whose face many experiences, many hard and painful experiences,
have ploughed deep furrows, the expression of the mouth indicating
the whole disharmony in which we see the lonely man at the end. Far
from his fatherland, under the protection of the King of France,
still struggling with the world and life, but lonely, forsaken,
misunderstood, although still loved by the friends who had not
neglected to accompany him.

In Leonardo's
case we see especially the greatness of spirit which endures much
suffering, as it accommodates itself to the body, first having
fashioned it perfectly and then leaving it embittered. When we look
into this countenance we feel the genius of humanity itself looking
out at us. Yes, we begin to understand this age, the time of sunset
in which Leonardo lived — the time which heralded a new dawn,
in which Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, Galileo lived —
and we see all the limitations and restrictions which Leonardo's
great spirit had to undergo. We understand the age and we understand
the great artist who transcends all human means and yet can, after
all, only work with human means. After we have studied the subject
attentively from the point of view of Spiritual Science, we must
bring the whole of our human intellect to bear on it, and gazing into
Leonardo's face we shall see the entire spirit of that age
looking out at us. Yes, from these embittered features there looks a
human spirit, at first inclining downwards. We must know it thus, to
understand the full greatness of the force which had to be there to
admit of the rise of a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Giordano Bruno. In
truth, we only obtain a proper reverence for the whole course and
evolution of the human spirit, if we know how the tragedy of Giordano
Bruno's death at the stake is even greater than studied in the
light of Leonardo's soul — conscious of its own weakness
before the passing, the downfalling of its age. Leonardo's
greatness only becomes evident to us when we get an inkling of what
he could NOT accomplish. That is connected with a
matter with which we will sum up today's considerations. It is
connected with the fact that the human soul can be satisfied —
aye, even made happy — at the sight of imperfection (although
more satisfied, it is true, by great than by little imperfection); at
the sight of that creative activity, which, due to its greatness,
fails of execution; for in these dying forces we guess at and finally
see the forces being prepared for the future, and from the sunset
there arises for us the promise and the hope of the dawn. The
relation of our souls to human evolution must always be such that we
say to ourselves: All progress takes this course: wherever what has
been created falls into ruin, we know that out of that ruin new life
will always blossom forth.